Richard Dudman, 99; reporter captured in Vietnam War
"If we get out of here alive," Richard Dudman said to two other journalists as they were being marched into the Cambodian jungle at gunpoint, "we're going to have one hell of a good story."
It was May 7, 1970, days after President Richard M. Nixon announced that U.S. forces would enter Cambodia as an outgrowth of the war in neighboring Vietnam. Dudman, on assignment for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, left the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon for the Cambodian border, less than 40 miles away.
He was accompanied by Elizabeth Pond of the Christian Science Monitor and Michael Morrow of Dispatch News Service International.
Dudman, who died Aug. 3 in Blue Hill, Maine, at age 99, was the Washington bureau chief of the Post-Dispatch and had made several previous trips to Vietnam.
After the three reporters crossed into the Parrot's Beak region of Cambodia, they reached a bridge that had been destroyed. As they attempted to turn around, armed Viet Cong-aligned guerrillas emerged from the forest and ordered the reporters out of their Jeep. They were forced to surrender their press credentials and were put into the back of a truck.
"The soldier with the automatic rifle kept it pointed at my chest," Dudman later wrote. "When I motioned politely to him to point it to one side, he waved it angrily at me and put the gun to my head. He kept it there all the while the truck bounced along jungle roads."
Bald and bespectacled and rarely seen in Washington without a bow tie, Dudman was then a 52-year-old father of two girls. He may not have had the image of the intrepid international reporter, but he had already covered wars and revolutions from Cuba to Burma to the Middle East for the Post-Dispatch, which then had a national reputation for ambitious journalism. He knew how to remain calm under pressure.
"In 1954, when he was covering a Guatemala revolution," his wife, Helen, told The Washington Post in 1970, "his editor told him, 'A dead correspondent is no use to us — and an injured one is worse.' He's used that as his guide."